Heed the Call of Vigorous Commerce!

What is it about the Victorian broadside that so pleases me? Is it simply nostalgia? Portly, vested, mutton-chopped America in the Gilded Age, relentlessly optimistic and vigorous in pursuit of its Manifest Destiny? Mustachioed lawmen eyeing dipsomaniacal pistoleros across dirt streets choked with longhorns? Or perhaps the self-assured, hearth-fire coziness of the British Empire—Sherlock Holmes on the case, the Hindoos subdued, the labouring classes mindful of their place.

Or is it instead the sheer hysteria of the medium? Overblown, stentorian exhortations and adumbrations - "LIFT HIGH THE SHINING CUP OF ENTERPRISE FOR ALL TO SIP!" "SMALL INFRACTIONS, SEVERELY PUNISHED!! A DEFENESTRATION OF PETTY THIEVES IN THE STRAND A FORTNIGHT HENCE!" A zillion different fonts outpointing and outserifing each other.


It resonates with my own, overwrought rhetoric. If I only could, I would post each blog entry in 15 different wood type styles, each one redolent of horse urine, sagebrush, cool granite banks and the sweet cedar of freshly-built gallows.

Surrealist Journalism - A Post-Structuralist Critique and Meta-Textual Dialogue

[Mark wrote:]

Interesting, funny, disturbing and strange. Morbid yet opaque. Piquant yet clairvoyant.

Here is my assessment:

1. It’s an ’88.

2. I have bad posture?

3. My eyes are dead ? ? Gee...thanks.

4. I have latent violence? Well yes I guess I do, but it’s only about scum, assholes and criminals.

5. The front is seats are cloth, not vinyl, and there are two seats. Yours and mine.

6. The impression I have of your brother is that he’s a heartless, soulless, uneducated, cigarette-smoking proto-serial killer. Is that accurate?

7. Have you ever thought of writing surrealist fiction?

[Doug wrote:]

No, the actual Mark was not slouching, nor were his eyes dead. The actual Mark has little if anything to do with our story. The Mark of the story, however, is a cold, hard man, a man of action, a man who drives a cop car and has seen the bad side of the world. He is a man qualified to cut through the crap. He calls life as he sees it, and he sees it with clear, hard eyes. The rose tint wore off long ago.

His slouch is a statement -- a strategy. Cigarettes, while implied, were at no point stated.

The Dodge Diplomat of the story is an '86 with vinyl bench seats. And the Doug of the story (wait, he is never named, let us call him the model narrator) may end up in the back seat, behind the prisoner grille. Which, by the way, the Diplomat of the story will have.

Anyone who knows you will think this is funny, anyone who doesn't will think you are world-wise, impressive -- and dangerous. Umberto Eco will write an essay about "The Layers of Mark". A course on Mark Gorney vis á vis Mark Gorney: Sémiotiques Syncrétiques will be taught at Université Toulouse.

In Which I Am Advised to Embrace my Inner Lightweight

So my brother and I are driving across the Golden Gate Bridge the other day in his 1986 Dodge Diplomat police cruiser. He drives it with the slouched, knowing crustiness of a detective who's seen far too much in his years on the force. Because he's a world music publicist.

For my part I've spent the whole of our trip up to Napa and the whole of the way back talking about my Novel, or rather Problems with my Novel, or rather Reasons Why I Can't Conceive of Starting to Think About Writing my Novel. In a thousand sentences launched with a screwed up face and "See, the thing is...." I have talked about Structural and Metaphoric Subtlety, and Biblical Mythos, and the Hero's Journey, and a gazillion other tricks the Real Writer has in his bag, none of which I feel I have, all of which make me a Fraud, a Hack, a Fake. I just write about Stuff. And if I have anything to say about the human condition, any compelling and nuanced psychological insights to fold within the subtext, it will be entirely of the reader's invention. I have no subtext, I whine. When I write, see, it is what it is...and that's all.

My brother scans the road with dead eyes as we pass between the Art Deco towers. The thick, red cables dip down, swoop up. His fingers touch the wheel with the latent violence that only a life in world music publicity can culture.

"Look," he says to me, "have you ever said anything profound in your entire life?"

"Uh, well.....no."

"So what makes you think you could put anything profound into a book?? Just write, for Christ's sake. Jesus."

The South Tower looms over me. I roll my head and look out at the Pacific as the rest of my life opens up in a sweeping vista that, were I not on the vinyl bench seat of a police car, would stagger.

It's true. I don't have anything in particular to say.

And....that's all right!



Coming tomorrow -- my first novel.